about the ROK. It hurt. And though the two Australians had no way of knowing it, in Chin’s mind their comments had confirmed the necessity of his mission. Even if the U.S. reserves from Japan arrived, they were not battle-tried. They might not even be able to land their convoy if blocked or otherwise engaged by the Soviet Eastern Fleet steaming south, or if they were attacked by one of the NKA’s diesel submarines. President Rah had been right — if the Republic of Korea was to be saved from communism, from utter defeat, drastic actions were called for.
The announcement came over the PA for the Lufthansa flight to West Berlin. It was surprisingly clear-voiced, unencumbered by the usual hollow echoes of most other airports he’d been in, and Chin took it as a good sign.
Aboard the plane Chin waited till takeoff, watching the passengers watching the cabin attendants watching the video of what to do in an emergency. He knew what to do — it was getting there that would be the problem. They had a safe house in Kreuzberg, three miles south of the old Reichstag and two miles southeast of the Church of Reconciliation.
Before the movie, in which a gray-haired Tom Cruise was playing a dignified old general, forced out of office for opposition to a new space-decked beam weapon, Chin went to the toilet and unbuttoned his shirt, taking a sheaf of deutsch marks from the money belt. They didn’t want him to use any traveler’s checks, and signatures that either the West or East German intelligence services could trace. One of the deutsch marks had been torn in half; the meet in Berlin would take place only when the other half of the bank note was received by Chin. The fact that the note had been hastily torn, ripped rather than neatly cut with scissors, was only a minor detail and made do difference to Chin, but the tear spoke volumes in terms of the urgency with which the operation had been set in place. It was, thought Chin, as if the person in the
When he returned to his seat, Chin sat back and tried to watch the movie. People were laughing, but Chin couldn’t hear it properly, the earphones crackling. Besides, his sinuses were acting up again. He pulled out his Dristan bottle and took a sniff. At thirty-five thousand feet the sinuses cleared, but he knew from his previous trips abroad that the trouble would start as soon as they began to descend, the pain like a red-hot needle being pushed through the bone directly above the bridge of your nose.
The thing that worried him most was that the success of the NKA’s special forces sabotage meant that the NKA network had been extensive and well trained, so that it was naive for him to think that Pusan, a major gateway to the West, had not been carefully watched by NKA operatives. The question was, had they had time to make him and/or follow him onto the same flight?
He looked around. The plane seemed full, and they would have had to bump someone or buy out someone else’s ticket to get space on such short notice. Of course, it wasn’t essential that they start at this end; they could merely fax instructions through to Berlin and follow him out from Tempelhof. If it was someone on the plane, it would be someone, Chin thought, very much like him, no luggage to declare so as not to be delayed in customs. They’d be carrying an overnight bag — maybe a camera. Touristy-looking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Colonel Douglas Freeman dreamed of war. The thought of commanding vast armies on a European front as battle moved back and forth across the surface of the earth so filled his imagination, the scenes of glory that visited him so powerful, that at times he couldn’t sleep. Then, walking quietly down to the main floor of his house, or rather the army’s house, which overlooked Monterey Beach, he would stare out into the darkness of the sea, beyond the line of fluorescent waves, at once convinced that his destiny was nowhere near fulfilled yet anxious as to what form it might take and when. In his basement den, TV earpiece in so as not to disturb his wife, Doreen, sleeping above, Freeman would replay the videos of all the wars; from the reconstructed sites of the Peloponnesian War to videos of Victory at Sea, the Great War, the long-lost battles of Indochina, and the most recently released footage from Britain’s war office of the Communist insurgency in Malaysia and the Falklands War. Everyone else who Freeman knew in the Armored Corps was busily writing tanks off, the debacle of the M-Is in the Uijongbu corridor supporting them. But Freeman believed the problem was not the team but the tactics. They were still fighting World War II; that was the trouble. The hardest thing, he knew, as did Guderian, Liddell Hart, and Patton, was to get a man to change his habit. Simple things — ask someone who loves coffee to drink water, a smoker to quit, to move anyone out of a mode that, for all its inconveniences and ill side effects, he’s grown familiar with, and you might as well talk to a rock. And after forty forget it. Freeman knew colonels no older than he was at fifty-five who, finding themselves in a crowded field for promotion, had simply stopped trying, accepting that colonel was as far as they’d go. Freeman wanted to “break out.”
He heard a faint scratching upstairs — their cat, Alexander, clawing at the kitchen door, and Doreen getting up to let him out. Freeman preferred dogs — cats could be so damned uppity— but he and Doreen had compromised, the Persian doglike in his loyalty.
Freeman expected loyalty, unconditionally, and it was something he and his wife had given each other. For the most part it had meant a happy marriage, with Doreen independent enough not to let the service life from here to there get her down. And now, with their two girls out of the nest and settled down, life was easier than it had been for years. But Freeman knew he would have few, if any, regrets if suddenly called upon to serve in Europe if war broke out. While other colonels he knew were planning their retirement, talking about secure portfolios with the bright young men from Harvard business school, Freeman spent most of his time in his basement, poring over his mock-ups of European battlefields, demolishing the army’s main battle tank and armored vehicle tactics. History repeated itself, and yet it did not. Like a football field, the terrain remained the same, but each match was different, no matter if you’d played the game a thousand times before. The important thing, he kept telling himself, was to keep yourself fit and ready.
He heard the slap of the morning paper on his porch and went upstairs. Still in his robe, he glanced at the headlines and began muttering. Korea was a rout. Air strikes from the Seventh Fleet were unable to inflict any decisive damage on the Communists so long as the North Korean troops continued to mingle with the panic-stricken streams of refugees. He switched on the TV— “Good Morning America.” The NATO line was on full alert, Soviet-WP forces flexing muscle along the line but both sides informing the other of any “unusually” heavy movement above battalion or squadron strength. But the State Department spokeswoman was assuring everyone that “despite the worsening situation in the Korean peninsula,” the State Department and the White House believed “that there is no danger of an outbreak of hostilities elsewhere.” The NATO and Soviet-Warsaw Pact alert, it was explained, “is fairly standard procedure in times of such tension.”
Freeman shook his head sardonically at the State Department’s use of the “Korean peninsula” instead of plain “Korea.” “Peninsula” made it seem not only far away and out of sight but a minor inconvenience; merely a wart on the body politic. Freeman sat there as the flickering TV images filled the darkened room like the flashes of distant artillery, more conscious now of the crashing of the sea no more than a hundred yards away, suddenly depressed by it all, wondering how many other men and women in their time had sat through their imagination’s lonely vigilance in the night and dreamed of far-off glory, of things yet undone, of leading their country out of dark hazard. He was thinking again of football, of how the “T” formation that had revolutionized the game had come directly from Coach Shaughnessy’s study of Guderian’s Panzers’ tactics during the infamous blitzkrieg of 1940 that had overrun France, thought to be the greatest military power of her day, in less than ten days. Shaughnessy was careful not to tell his players or anyone else he’d been studying the Nazis, but he started drawing “funny” diagrams on the board and then suddenly it happened. The Chicago Bears devastated the Washington Redskins’ defense. Bears seventy-three, Washington zip. Then Shaughnessy took the T formation to Stanford, derided as the all-time losers in the Pacific Coast conference. Another blitzkrieg. A lightning run which shot Stanford from the doghouse of the Pacific Coast conference to whipping Nebraska twenty-one to thirteen.
But Freeman knew, as Shaughnessy had, that tactics are always changing. Shaughnessy’s T formations were no longer as effective in the modern world, and just as the football coach had studied the German general, it was now time, Freeman believed, for the general to look at the new game of football. Increased sophistication in communication, allowing instantaneous instructions from coach to player, was akin to the state-of-the-art electronic communications between the tank commander and his echelons. There was less time to make a decision, and the only way to counteract it was to buy time with more sophisticated deception. He had thought about it long and hard
